Orange County Digest

Irvine : Funds to Computerize Greek Texts Received

A unique UC Irvine project in which Greek texts are stored in a computer has received nearly $400,000 in recent grants, the university announced.

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Project is "the world's only computerized data bank of ancient Greek texts," said Colleen Bently-Adler, a spokeswoman for the university. She said the 15-year-old project's latest awards are a $354,000 matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, $25,000 from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and $14,000 from the Costas and Mary Maliotis Charitable Foundation in Boston.

Theodore Brunner, director of the project, said that since its inception in 1972, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae has received $6.5 million in financial support from private and governmental donors.

Brunner said the latest grants will allow him to add to the computerized data bank, which already has writings of more than 3,000 Greek authors from 750 BC to AD 600.

"This allows us a start at further recording and preserving the roots of Western man," Brunner said. He added that Thesaurus Linguage Graecae is like a vast international library and said its resources are used by scholars throughout the world.